Ocean: Frontier for men of vision;

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THE OCERR: FRUITIER FOR RIER OF UISIOR
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By Marshall D. Shulman
The sea has always excited man's imag­ination.
The smell of the sea evokes
adventure. Its restless energy has the
power to soothe or to terrify. And
somewhere in its murky depths are
clues to the great mysteries of the
origins of the planet and of man him­self.
But now, quite suddenly as time is
measured, many of the things man has
imagined himself doing in and with the
sea are becoming practical possibilities
—to draw food and energy from it in
great abundance, to live upon the
ocean floor, to extract from it count­less
resources and medicines, to con­trol
its moods and even to unravel its
mysteries. Yesterday's science fiction
has become today's reality, and is be­coming
tomorrow's business opportu­nity.
No one of us will be untouched by
modern man's dramatic return to the
sea. For each of us—scientist, engineer,
businessman, government official,
sportsman—the ocean has become a
new frontier for men of vision.
We all shall have to learn to look at
the sea with fresh imagination—and es­pecially
those of us whose task is to
translate technology's possibilities into
practical operations of industry and
commerce. Economic feasibility may
be a more crucial limiting factor than
technology, and it will be those who
know how to bring together invest­ment,
production methods, marketing
and technical skills who will deter­mine
how fast we shall move toward
the new uses of the sea. Forward-look­ing
accountants who have studied
Marshall D. Shulman is the Director of the Rus­sian
Institute and Professor of Government at
Columbia University. He is the author of Stalin's
Foreign Policy Reappraised and Beyond the Cold
War, and has participated in several important
conferences on the uses of the seas. Dr. Shulman
is a consultant to H&S on international affairs.
ocean problems will clearly play an im­portant
role in analyzing the costs in­volved
in these developments.
The very nature of the ocean—its
size, its involvement of other countries,
its complex scientific, engineering and
defense aspects—obliges us to devise
new patterns of state and federal gov­ernment
relations with the private sec­tor,
and new international arrange­ments
that may involve regulatory,
licensing and taxing powers. It also
poses new responsibilities because of
the special hazards it represents. Three
quarters of the earth is covered by
water, and as man pushes outward
from his crowded continents seeking
new sources of food, energy and living
space, the haunting question is whether
he will litter the seas as he has done
the earth until finally the entire planet
becomes unfit for human life, and
whether he will make of the seas a
battleground instead of a beneficence.
Those who help to develop the use of
the ocean resources will be severely
judged if they do not match inventive­ness
with responsibility. The new ocean
frontier by its nature imposes new
ways of thinking upon us, for it is a re­source
we hold in common. We are all
custodians of the sea, for ourselves and
each other and for the generations that
will follow.
During the coming months, the most
important basis for public discussion
of the issues raised by ocean develop­ment
is likely to be a report recently
issued by the Commission on Marine
Science, Engineering and Resources,
authorized by an act of Congress in
1966. This report, prepared under the
chairmanship of Dr. Julius A. Stratton,
chairman of the Ford Foundation and
former President of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, is destined to
become a classic model of how a na­tion
can seek to achieve an overview
of complex problems that cut across
many sectors of public and private life,
and to encourage anticipatory thinking
about what needs to be done over an
entire decade. Accountants, manage­ment
advisory men and tax specialists
whose clients may be dealing with the
development of sea resources will find
this report valuable background read­ing.
One of the seven panels which
worked under the Commission devoted
itself to relations between government
and private industry. The main burden
of its recommendations is that far-sighted
government policies can create
a favorable climate in which "industry
would be particularly encouraged to
generate additional ideas, methods and
risk capital for the detailed surveying,
delineating, producing and marketing
of marine resources." Recognizing that
the government would have to move
forward to clarify national regulatory
policies and international arrangements
governing ocean activities, the Com­mission
argued that predictability on
these scores would encourage an ade­quate
supply of private investment
capital. It recommended, therefore,
that direct governmental subsidies were
less needed to encourage industry to
generate capital for marine investments
than to provide research, exploration,
basic technology and supporting
services.
This spelling out the implications of
a mixed economy for a developing
technological field may have far-reach­ing
importance in many other aspects
of our economic life. Many areas of
contention between competing interest
groups and between public and private
considerations will remain as these